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On Spec: The Canadian Magazine Of The Fantastic vol 18 no. 1 # 63 Spring 2006
01/08/2006 . Source: Donna Jones 
Magazine: Copper Pig Writers Society. Price: $ 5.95 (CAN). ISSN: 0843-476X. Distributed in Canada by CMPA and the UK by BAR. Buy On Spec: The Canadian Magazine Of The Fantastic in the USA - or Buy On Spec: The Canadian Magazine Of The Fantastic in the UK  check out website: www.onspec.ca
You got to give 'On Spec' its dues, they certainly know how to pick images for their front covers! This one is a rather good creation by Jim Beveridge entitles 'Where There's Smoke'. Very eye-catching and certainly an atmospheric start to the edition.
Also included in this one was a chapbook. Sadly, not of original work, but this where you also have to give 'On Spec' its dues. They made mistakes with previously published material and instead of ignoring it and moving on with the next issue, they reprinted them in a chapbook. I think that at least a small modicum of humble pie to do such a thing.
This time around, I found some of the stories hard to get into. A couple were just not my cup of tea and that said you can't please everyone, especially an opinionated cuss like me! But still, reading this issue there were some shorts that were really good and not for obvious reasons.
For example 'Hell-Train' by Nicole Luiken was unmistakably a demon-ridden romp into the American Western genre but what made me think this was an exceptional read was that it wasn't over-baked. Very down to earth, witty prose mixed with what was an essentially simple plot worked for me on so many levels. The characters came screaming out of the page at you and what I really liked was that it wasn't built up into something it clearly would never be. Great storytelling is people-oriented not action-oriented!
'The Tamale God' by Jeffrey D. Johnson was really quite a sedentary tale about a man who earned this living selling tamales at the end of a pier in Monteray. We catch up with him when he is being hassled to sell his tamale cart to what he thinks is an antiques collector. The story unfolds quite quickly after the collector, bogus name and all tries to steal the cart one night. Unfortunately, he gets caught and then explains what the cart is really for. Which brings us to the end when the Tamale God finally appears! Faith cannot be made by a machine? Think again!
Imagine being eaten alive by a hunger? Well in 'Soul Hunger' by Rebecca M. Senese that's exactly what we get to see. First, it devours people around her and then because it isn't fed, it takes her. The author of this one deftly compared it to cancer which in a way is exactly what cancer does to a person, but this story just went that little bit further. Quite a horrific tale which appealed to my horror sensibilities!
This issues overall content wasn't the best that I have read of 'On Spec' for a long time. A little bit of disappointment seeped into my enjoyment of this one and the only way I can explain why I didn't get hooked like usual, was that some of the stories felt...listless.
I just hope this is a start of the year lull in submissions rather than a gathering trend for the magazine. This reader has her fingers firmly crossed that it's the former reason and not the latter!
Donna Jones
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